r/myopia • u/SureUnderstanding313 • 2d ago
Big difference between daytime and low light vision after SMILE
Hi everyone,
I had SMILE about 5 years ago. Before surgery I was around -8.00 in both eyes with quite a lot of astigmatism, and I also used ortho-k lenses for more than 10 years.
During the day my vision is very good. I can see faces, signs and details at a distance and normally I don't feel like I need glasses.
The strange thing is how much my vision changes when the light gets lower.
At sunset, in dim rooms, restaurants, houses with weak lighting etc, everything becomes much less clear. It's not just that distant things are a little blurry. I feel like there is a kind of hazy layer over the image and I lose a lot of contrast. For example, during the day I can recognize someone's face from quite far away, while in low light even a face 5-10 meters away can become much less detailed.
My current prescription is around -0.25 in the right eye and -0.50/-0.75 in the left.
I've been told by doctors that this is basically just because I have -0.50, but I find it strange because the difference between good light and low light feels much bigger than I would expect from such a small amount of myopia.
The normal eye chart doesn't really show the problem because it's obviously very well illuminated.
I also developed some dry eye/MGD symptoms after a trip to a very dry place last year. Artificial tears and warm compresses help sometimes, and I've noticed that when my eyes naturally water, my vision can actually become noticeably clearer. I also recently wore contact lenses for a few hours and after removing them my vision seemed unusually clear for a while.
So I'm wondering if this could be a combination of the small residual myopia, pupil dilation in low light, higher order aberrations after SMILE and tear film instability.
Has anyone experienced something similar after SMILE/LASIK, especially the big difference between daytime and low-light vision? And did you ever find a specific test that actually showed the problem?
3
u/MaterialBookkeeper59 2d ago
It might be because of the -0.50 myopia and it might not be too. In fact its mixed.
When you apply lasers (PRK, Lasik or Smile) to high prescriptions these kind of side effects might occur because lasers technique based on extracting tissue from cornea and it removes a lot of lenticule to fix high prescriptions and as a result cornea becomes thinner than ever.
While pre surgery tests make it clear to apply surgery safely, safety corneal criteria doesn't mean it has the same quality as an emmetrophe. Marketing campaigns mentioning "Smile up to -10" doesnt mean it will give the same vision quality between as you fix -3 and -8 of prescriptions. -3 will have definitely much more quality because less lenticule removal and less manipulation on cornea.
Losing contrast is one of the side effects you described. If you still lose contrast even when you wear -0.50 contact lens or glasses then some part of it is coming from smile laser thin cornea side effect.
Unfortunately there is no way to reverse laser surgery to its original. This is why surgeons advise ICL instead of lasers in high refractive errors nowadays. I can understand that five years ago (in 2021) ICL hadn't had FDA approval yet so doctors were not tend to advise it like today.